How difficult was it for you to migrate from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10?

[jens]

Why would you switch to 10 rather than 11?

Even though you're ruling that out now:

You can install both 10 and 11 simpky over 7 or 8 on the same machine btw. - the Windows installer will take care of everything and you don't normally have to re-install anything - piece of cake...

I thought that initially but he mentioned "My current DAW is several years old". It's likely too retro for Win11 to be possible. Your pc has to be fairly recent for Win11 to be possible.

Yes, but in the meantime he ruled out keeping the same machine.

Fwiw these last two years or so I did some calculations and find it barely worth it anymore to built a machine yourself... just get a good laptop deal and be done with it.

[Mind Riot]

Then,without any warning,the computer blew up and our hopes and dreams were totally shattered...

That's funny, the same thing happened to me when I tried to demo Sonar back in the day.

[Mind Riot]

Yes, but in the meantime he ruled out keeping the same machine.

Fwiw these last two years or so I did some calculations and find it barely worth it anymore to built a machine yourself... just get a good laptop deal and be done with it.

Indeed, everyone is making excellent points to consider. Thanks to you all!

If my current PC was more robust I'd consider upgrading in place but an i5 CPU based PC from 2013 or 2014 is kind of outgunned by the newer OS' at this point. It hums right along running Windows 7 and does everything I ask.

I haven't been keeping up with the latest and greatest in the computer world, but the reigning CPU king at the moment seems to be AMD's new Ryzen line. From what I hear they're fast and new and expensive. I've always tried to aim a couple years or so behind what's cutting edge in order to get good performance for reasonable prices; I can't afford the newest top of the line stuff.

But maybe if I keep going with what I've got for another six months or even a year, the prices on the Ryzen PCs will start to drop into somewhere I can afford.

Or if I stayed with Intel, there are already decent prices to be found. For my part, I have no problem with buying a refurbished Dell and using it as my DAW, and there are hundreds of them on newegg that get pretty powerful for not a huge amount of money.

So I think I'll just wait around a bit. Let the Ryzens saturate more of the market and begin to get cheaper, let Windows 11 become more established to where it's available on more PCs, and see where things stand in six months. Read up on some things, and try to save up some money for a potential new PC a bit down the line.

[SamDi]

Hm why not making it completly new? I appreciate to get the PC lean after years of collecting trash, which made it slower and more unstable over the years. And it‘s a good chance of getting rid of old stuff, because you need not to actively sort out, but just install, what you really need. 2-3 years is a common time, after that you should make your PC new IMO. BTW, I consider it the same for Macs.

[jens]

the reigning CPU king at the moment seems to be AMD's new Ryzen line. From what I hear they're fast and new and expensive.

You could go with either 12th or 13th gen Intel or 5th gen Ryzen...

expensive? That totally depends - both the 7600x and the 13600k are somewhere between 300 and 400$ atm and are absolute monsters... they are pretty much on par with each other and as usual AMD is a little less expensive than Intel. EDIT: nope, it seems the 13600k totally mops the floor with the Ryzen, so that is clearly the one to get right now.

[jens]

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores

Only Ryzen 9s can compete with/outperform the i5 12600k...

[zeep]

I recently was curious about trying out an Acustica plug or two and they flat out don't support anything below 10. I'm completely locked out; the Acquarius installer won't even contact their server.

Have the same issue. All installers, plugins and software works -still- on my Win 7 daw, Native Instruments, Fabfilter, Ableton, Izotope, IK Multimedia, Waves.. Everything works except Acustica Aquarius. It sucks i can't update installed Acustica plugins, nor can i demo new plugins.

I will move to win 10 soon enough, but i'm not going to upgrade just for Acustica.

[BassMasterK]

I went from Win 7 to Win 10 less than 2 years ago. I took the opportunity to upgrade my Mobo/CPU at the time as well. If I remember correctly I did the OS upgrade last and contrary to popular advice, I didn't do a fresh install, I let it replace my OS while keeping my programs in place. I figured since I only use my rig for recording it was pretty lean and if the migration function worked at all, my system would be a good candidate for it. Was actually surprised I still was able to get a free upgrade to Win 10 by inputting my Win 7 key. Everything worked. iLok and eLicenser worked fine. I had a handful of soft synth developers that forced me to reauthorize but nothing that was a big hassle. I probably spent more time dealing with Win 10 trying to "help" me set up my system and finding where system settings were located, than I spent really fixing things that broke along the way. It was easier than I was expecting.

Because I am a glutton for punishment I upgraded to Cubase 12 right shortly after it dropped, even though I knew better. This was right after the Win 10 upgrade. Now that....that was painful.